User talk:Caesar Schinas/Archive 2

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Caesar Schinas
Current Talk Page
Archives	1, 2, 3

Moved everything except conversations edited today to /Archive 1. 15:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bot support for approval process

Hi Caesar, please take a look at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,2666.0.html and if you see ways to make the process technically simpler (e.g. by means of a bot or of supplementary name spaces), please let us know. Thanks! --Daniel Mietchen 16:55, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

1. Well... It looks far more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm not entirely familiar with the system. I imagine the best solution would be a custom MW plugin which added approved article support.
2. A non-technical comment - shouldn't typos, grammar, etc be allowed to be changed without re-approval (though obviously only by Constables or Editiors)?
3. Another interesting topic... should images used in approved articles be protected? Personally I think not, but it's worth bearing in mind that at present images in approved articles can be changed/replaced quite easily.

Caesar Schinas 10:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I numbered your points and entirely agree with the first two. As for the third, I see the point (and the same would apply to templates) but this hasn't been a problem so far. Once the first two are sorted out, we could include into the approval process a posting of approved versions to some internet archiving sites, e.g. http://www.webcitation.org/. --Daniel Mietchen 11:49, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I agree that unless problems start to occur images (and, as you say, templates) shouldn't be protected. And if they were, there would have to be multiple copies of them - each approved article would need a copy which was as it was when the article was approved - a lot of trouble.

I must admit to never having heard of webcitation.org, but it looks like a good idea to automate posting of approved versions to sites like that, if possible.

But someone will have to create the plugins(s), and as I said on the forum, I just don't have the time at the moment. Caesar Schinas 12:47, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean to push you into doing this, and sorry if you understood it this way. I am fully aware of the limitations of volunteer projects like this one. --Daniel Mietchen 15:07, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No no, not at all. I just meant that whilst I'm eager to see this sorted out, I can't see anyone getting round to it in the near future. I'm very happy to give my feedback on issues like this, and I realise you're not trying to push me into actually implementing it... I was just lamenting the fact that I can't! :-) Caesar Schinas 15:14, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

unlocked the Cascading protection

I went back to the Speedydelete template and unlocked (I think) the Cascading protection on the other pages. Hayford Peirce 22:53, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Alright; thanks Hayford. As I said, I'm not really objecting to specific pages/templates - but I do think we must be careful not to protect too much when it's not entirely necessary or may not be clear why, which is one of WP's problems. In particular, I think that templates should be protected on a case by case basis rather than using the cascading option. But most of all, I think a policy for exactly what should and shouldn't be protected is probably needed. Caesar Schinas 10:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You've gotta understand that I come very late to this discussion and that in any case templates are something that is far over my head. Tell me what should be protected and what shouldn't be. The one in particular that I protected (and then removed the cascading feature from) was something that Chris or someone else came up with at some point and made a particular point of wanting to keep where it is. That's all I know, or understand about it. I certainly trust *you* to play around with it, but I didn't want someone else to go in and mistakenly fool around with it. If Chris, or whoever the creator (and guru) is, says it should be unprotected, I'll be happy to do so.

In the meantime, I've deleted all of the new templates you put up for deletion *except* for the one you labeled as being an experiment by Chris that he *might* want to keep. Let's wait to hear from him on this.

When I'm deleting templates I *always* try to look to see if the Discussion tab on that page is live -- if it is, I first go there and delete the talk page, then go back and delete the main article. But *sometimes* I forget to look at the tab to see if it's red or blue. It's therefore conceivable that with the hundreds of deletions I've done in the last month or so I've overlooked a Discussion page deletion even though the main article itself has been deleted. Is there any way that this can be checked, to see if there are loose Discussion pages floating around? Hayford Peirce 17:58, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah; so you do read the reason for deletion... :-p

Yes; we'd better wait for to hear from Chris about that one. I've left a message on his talk page.

I was wondering about finding orphaned talk pages myself. I haven't found a way, but there are quite a few of them... It doesn't help that in the default Pinkwich5 theme the link to the talk page is the same colour whether or not it exists.

The same applies to doc pages; there are quite a few orphaned doc pages for templates which have been deleted. Again, I'm not sure how to find them. But whenever you delete a template, could you also delete the /doc subpage if it exists? It should say that it does on the template page - "documentation transcluded from ...". I always try to mark the doc page separately. I've never done this for the talk page; should I?

Caesar Schinas 05:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I always read the reasons given for a speedy delete and, in some cases, try to verify them. A couple of times in the past I've decided that the reasons were invalid and the requests were withdrawn.

Hmm, I didn't realize that *other* linked pages could be left dangling if I deleted the main article. I knew that the Talk page could, and that's why I brought the subject up. I'll try to deal with any others that I encounter in the future.

If you ever come across any lists of orphaned pages in any form, please let me know where it is so that I can add it to the "look at" list for Constables. Thanks! Hayford Peirce 17:05, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, there's Special:LonelyPages, but as with so many other parts of MediaWiki it's made practically useless by the subpages system. Apart from that, I've never found a list, I'm afraid. Caesar Schinas 17:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The same applies to metadata pages for articles in the main namespace, of course; I don't know if you've thought of that? There's often a lot of them...

I don't seem to have been right about not deleting many more templates, do I... :-D Caesar Schinas 17:21, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

There's something wrong with the Lonely Pages list. I recognized one the names of it and clicked http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Abdul_Rashid_Dostum/Definition That's a definition that Howard created a few days ago and it links directly to a Main Article that Howard also wrote. So it looks to me as if that title is meaningless.

Well, you find 'em, I'll delete them.... Hayford Peirce 17:31, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

That's what I meant; almost all metadata subpages appear there. I think it's because the link isn't a straight link in the article, but rather is created by the subpages template dynamically. So MediaWiki doesn't recognise it. I think... Caesar Schinas 17:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hayford, if you use greasemonkey you can run a script which hides metadata links on the special pages. It's not ideal, but it's workable; I've been using this system today to try to create a list of previously unknown templates, which weren't listed at CZ:Templates... (It's frightening.)

Oh, and it might be as well to warn you in case you get a heart attack when you go to Category:Speedy_Deletion_Requests... there are 90 pages there! :-D

Caesar Schinas 16:32, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Yikes, on both counts! Well, you find 'em, I'll fix 'em! Hayford Peirce 16:40, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Possibly a template that we shouldn't have deleted?

You may be following some of the Forum discussions in which I've been bitching about the difficulties I had with my last article Approval. Would you take at look at this smaller discussion on Joe Quick's talk page and tell me what you think? Thanks! http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User_talk:Joe_Quick#subpages_template Hayford Peirce 02:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

According to a more recent comment from Joe, the preload template he mentioned never existed anyway. But thanks for alerting me...

I've actually been trying to basically keep away from the stuff behind the subpages system. I don't really understand it, as I wasn't involved in its development, and I haven't found sufficiently clear documentation to make me comfortable with it...

Caesar Schinas 06:07, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I can understand this sentiment. i wrote most of it and have to relearn the logic now and then. Not to mention I am not a programmer and I know there is a lot of naive coding in there. It was a case of knowing how I wanted it to function and writing something (anything) that would get us there. It has undergone a few design iterations to try and slim it down but obviously a total rewrite is better. The best, and only documentation, is what you see at {{subpages}} (and I have tried to write hidden comments in the code). I have tried to be rigorous in keeping it up-to-date, but I'm sure I have missed things here and there. With regard to keep things slim, a lot of the code and templates were pre "new processor" days and I know a lot of them are unnecessary now with regard to keeping the size and loading time to a minimum. By the way, thanks for making such a big effort towards standardizing the templates here. This was long overdue. Chris Day 17:15, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Ooops... a comment from Matt Innis, I mean. On Joe's userpage. :-/ Caesar Schinas 10:13, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Re-locating TOCs

Caesar, two things. First, some of our authors very much prefer the TOC on the right ... for example, Howard Berkowitz. Second, in some articles TOC is placed on the left to avoid a conflict with an image on the right. I don't think that a bot for standardizing the TOC location is a wise idea. Milton Beychok 15:19, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

No, sorry, I didn't explain myself properly... I'm not altering the location, just consolidating two related templates into one for maintainability and to reduce template clutter.

So instead of two templates, {{TOC-left}} and {{TOC-right}}, we would have one template, {{TOC}}, which can be called with an optiona argument : left or right.

So {{TOC-left}} becomes {{TOC|left}} and {{TOC-right}} becomes {{TOC|right}}.

The appearance is identical (the TOC-left and TOC-right templates just transclude Template:TOC at present).

For more info see Template:TOC.

Caesar Schinas 15:25, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

As long as the location doesn't change, and can later be reset by any author with the usual sort of edit, then I don't see why it should be any problem at all. Unless there are technical elements involved that I don't know about. Hayford Peirce 16:04, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Just an ordinary edit which could be reverted by anyone, should they so wish.

But what I was asking Matt was not really meant to be specific to this template - I wanted to know if it is acceptable for me to run a find and replace bot under my own username, as I have been doing today, or if it should have its own bot account (so that its edits don't show up in recent changes).

Caesar Schinas 16:10, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I just don't know what to say, Caesar, speaking as a Constable. I would certainly trust *you* to run any bot you wanted to, but I would be leery of letting just *anyone* do it at any given moment until that person had clearly displayed his/her responsibility here for a while. Why don't you email Matt, Chris Day, and Larry about it? (At WP, one of the items that finally led me to leave forever, an administrator created a bot that started changing "science-fiction" to "science fiction" as in "he was a science-fiction writer who wrote science fiction", where the hyphen is called for in the first usage -- at least if you want to be absolutely grammatically correct, which I, as a former science-fiction writer myself, do. I started yelping about it as soon as I noticed, and a couple of other people did too, and she reluctantly shut down her bot. We argued about it for a couple of days, and she finally agreed that she wouldn't run it any more. BUT she refused to change back the couple of hundred changes she had already made. Grrrrrrrrrr!) Hayford Peirce 16:19, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Yessss..... I can see your point - which is why I wanted to check.

I have left a comment on Matt's talk page. I'm reluctant to email, since it means that the discussion takes place without anyone else being able to take part....

Running the bot under my own username means, of course, that it's not possible for me to make any changes which I couldn't make anyway, but I can make a lot more of them. Of course, that applies to your science-fiction anecdote too.

I don't know what the restrictions or lack thereof on a bot account are, or whether they are set on a case-by-case basis.

When I say bot - what I'm basically doing is making very specific changes to a whole load of articles at once by running scripts from my computer. It's not an automated process which runs every certain period of time, like most bots, I just give it a command and it executes it on all articles which I specify once. I'm not sure if that even counts as being a bot, actually...

Caesar Schinas 16:28, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I certainly see your argument that by using your "bot", or whatever you want to call it, you're merely automating a process that you are perfectly allowed to do individually on an item by item basis. But as Goldfinger says to James Bond at some point when they have come across each other for the third time, "I have a saying, Mr. Bond. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." So I'm *still* a little leery of it. Let's say, as a thought experiment,*you* did exactly the same "science-fiction" change I mentioned above, in perfectly good faith, honestly believing that you were correcting an error. You ran it overnight and by the time I got up in the morning all 10,000 usages of it here at CZ had been changed. (I exaggerate greatly, of course.) I expostulate, you reply, the anger mounts, and finally you stalk away from CZ, never to return. All 10,000 changes remain as they are. And no one here knows how to write a bot to restore them. Then what? Obviously I don't expect anything at all like this to happen, but I *do* think that other people with more knowledge of these matters ought to weigh in on it. Hayford Peirce 16:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes I completely agree with that point of view. But we still await a reply from Matt on what I should do instead... (I haven't asked Chris, since he doesn't seem to be around at present.) Caesar Schinas 16:46, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh and by the way, Hayford, it seems that you Constables can revert a whole bunch of edits by the same author at once if you so wish. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Reverting#Rollback. Caesar Schinas 13:49, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Template for the Talk Page Etiquette

Hi Caesar, that's fantastic all the work you've been doing to straighten out the Templates situation. While you're at it, could you pinpoint for me the template that creates the blue box at the top of this User Talk page on which I'm now writing, the one that tells us what the etiquette is for using a Talk page? Thanks! Hayford Peirce 16:08, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's at MediaWiki:Talkpagetext - one of those dratted pages which ordinary mortals such as myself aren't allowed to edit. Caesar Schinas 16:11, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I know you want to change the bit about indentation - personally I disagree, since the tree system is standard. But never mind, it's not that big an issue... Caesar Schinas 16:13, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, I *know* that there are people who disagree. But it *was* hashed out in the Forums and I *thought* that we had come to a clear consensus on it. You know, it's sort of like when I lived in Tahiti for 25 years, a French country with French rules. By the time I left, they had traffic lights and stop signs in *most* places, but they also had the venerable French rule for right of way on the roads of "priorite a droit". So you could be driving along on a main road and some @#$%^&* could come shooting out of a tiny side road right in front of you and scream "priorite a droit!" at you. *My* reading of the traffic laws was that this only worked if the roads were of equivalent size and importance, but most Frenchmen don't see it that way. If you've driven in France, I'm sure you've encountered this situation. And probably cursed. But it's their country and their rules. Which is what I think the situation is here at CZ -- it's our Wiki and our rules. If we want to have this discussion all over again in the Forums, and this time the Tree-people jump in with both feet and make a good enough of an argument that the Tree form should be used, then fine, what do I care? If I can figure out precisely how it's used, then, as a Kop, I'll try to enforce that also. In the meantime, I think everyone ought to do their best to follow the indentation rules -- personally I think it's easier to follow, but I'm just a dumb cop. Hayford Peirce 16:30, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Fine by me - I'll try and remember to abide by whatever rules are agreed, though it won't come naturally...

My main objection to indenting all comments is that it defeats the object of indenting at all, really. But most discussions on CZ do en up being linear, like this one so far. Which means there's not much point in indenting at all, except to mark where one comment stops and the next starts, which could equally well be done by, say, placing a blank line between comments, or some such system.

But don't worry; if it's been agreed upon in the past, I won't argue any more. Caesar Schinas 16:41, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

As far as I can see, it's simply a mechanism to let the casual reader see that a new commentator has added a new comment. As you say, it could also be done simply by putting in a line break. BUT, in that case, there are many comments that are fairly lengthy and that ALSO have line breaks within them in order to create two or more paragraphs of text. So THAT could lead to confusion, particularly, as DOES happen, a contributor forgets to add his signature at the end. Then it looks as if the NEXT comment is the same as the paragraph just above it. Hayford Peirce 16:48, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, true. What it boils down to, really, is that MediaWiki is ... not a very good piece of software.

One day I'll get round to writing a WordPress-based wiki engine. Comments built in!

Caesar Schinas 16:51, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, is it still possible to customise one's signature, or was that disabled? Caesar Schinas 16:52, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I think I've seen that different numbers of tildes give somewhat different results. As for customizing sigs, I don't know. I have a *feeling* that this is either actively discouraged or absolutely forbidden. I'm *sure* we don't want WP-like sigs in four colors, with dancing stars, flashing lights, and whatever other weird stuff people can come up with. I say this merely because I have never once, in two years here, *seen* anything else than a standard sig. Once again, that's the sort of question that Chris Day, once he finishes up the term, will be able to answer in a flash. Hayford Peirce 17:22, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Customized signatures were disabled just after the project was launched so that signatures would match real-names. --Joe Quick 18:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Joe. Pity; I like having a talk link in my signature. Ah well; at least they'll all be standard this way, and no dancing stars and flashing lights... Caesar Schinas 13:36, 25 May 2009 (UTC)